Capitalism from Serfdom to Slavery to Subscriptions: How Labor—and Human Dignity—Got Unbundled
For most of recorded history, work has been the price of survival. But the terms of that bargain—who works, for whom, and on what conditions—have changed radically, often violently. If yesterday’s economy chained people to land (feudalism) and later to owners (slavery), today’s economy increasingly binds livelihoods to platforms, data, and code. The next frontier—automation and AI—threatens to unmoor income from work altogether while shifting consumption from ownership to subscription. The question is whether we design a humane transition—or let dignity, agency, and broad prosperity become historical footnotes.
I. Feudalism: Duties Without Exit
Medieval Europe’s feudal order organized production through obligation. Serfs were “unfree” peasants tied to an estate; they owed labor, rents in kind, and loyalty to a lord in exchange for protection and access to land. There was no labor market in any modern sense—no competitive wage, little mobility, and scant recourse against abuse. Human dignity was circumscribed by birth; social status, not individual capability, determined the boundaries of a life.
Even when feudalism frayed—through plague, peasant revolts, commutations of labor dues into money payments—its logic persisted: hierarchy first, subsistence second, choice last.
II. Slavery: Property as Production Technology
Where feudalism bound people to land, chattel slavery turned people themselves into capital. In the Atlantic economies, enslaved Africans and their descendants were treated as assets to be bought, sold, collateralized, and brutally exploited for plantation profits. It was not merely an aberrant labor system; it was an industrial technology of coercion, with ledgers, mortgages, and insurance. It maximized output by annihilating autonomy.
The aftershocks—legal apartheid, racialized labor markets, wealth gaps—survive long after abolition. In the genealogy of work, slavery is the negation of dignity: not “you are what you do,” but “you are what we own.”
III. Wage Work: Freedom With Frictions
Industrial capitalism replaced status and bondage with contract and wage, unlocking extraordinary growth. People could, in principle, sell their labor to the highest bidder. But the early factory floor reproduced feudal and slave logics in milder form: long hours, child labor, dangerous conditions, company scrip, and housing tied to employers. Dignity advanced only when counterweights—unions, public education, safety laws, social insurance—made contracts something more than “your money or your life.”
Where have morals and ethics in capitalism gone?
Maybe they were never there to begin with.
The New Deal compromises and postwar social settlements in many countries created a new bargain: productivity gains would finance rising wages; ownership would be democratized through pensions and home equity; and a middle class would consume what it produced. Dignity became a mass possibility.
IV. Platforms, Precarity, and the Data Factory
Over the last forty years, the ground shifted again. Globalization, deregulation, mergers, and digitization created concentrated markets with outsized corporate power and fissured workforces—franchises, subcontractors, temp agencies, and gig platforms that displace responsibility down the chain. Workers became “independent contractors” in name, algorithmically managed employees in practice. Data—the exhaust of labor and life—turned into a hidden input that platforms collect and monetize.
Your name. Your location. Your shopping habits. Your political leanings. Your health status. Your voice. Your face. Your keystrokes. Every day, corporations vacuum up terabytes of your personal data—not to serve you better, but to sell you, shape you, and control you.
This stage preserves the appearance of free choice—flexibility, self-employment—while often stripping workers of benefits, bargaining power, and predictable income. Dignity is reframed as the right to rate your delivery driver rather than your right to stability, voice, and a fair share.
V. Automation and AI: The End of Labor’s Centrality?
A new discontinuity is arriving: machines that substitute not just brawn but cognition. Industrial robots already outpace humans in repeatable tasks; machine learning now drafts emails, analyzes images, writes code, and designs parts. Two forces drive displacement:
Task-level substitution: AI picks off specific tasks inside jobs (document review, quality control, scheduling), compressing headcount without eliminating roles outright—until the residue of tasks can be recombined into fewer jobs.
Scale-without-labor business models: Software-first firms can serve millions with marginal staffing—usage grows, but payroll barely does.
BLACK SWAN INCOMING
Researchers agree that there will be mass disruption in the age of AI, we need to carefully move forward and protect those must vulnerable to it’s worst aspects.
Historically, technology has created new tasks and industries; average living standards rose. The risk now isn’t joblessness everywhere but decoupling: productivity and profits soar while median wages stagnate, and the distribution of gains concentrates at the top. Without redesign, we’ll have more goods and services than ever—paired with insecure incomes to buy them.
VI. The Consumer Turn: From Owning to Renting Life
As labor income softens, the consumption model is also morphing:
Subscriptions and “as-a-service” replace one-time purchases: software, media, razors, cars, even home appliances become monthly fees.
Locks and loaders: digital rights management and proprietary ecosystems make repair, resale, or switching costly.
Data tethering: products degrade or disappear without server-side authorization; your “purchase” depends on a company’s ongoing consent.
The result is subtle but profound: less autonomy in consumption (you rent access rather than own tools), higher lifetime costs, and recurring dependence on corporate terms that can change without your vote. For households already squeezed by volatile incomes, living on subscriptions is like living on the edge of a treadmill.
VII. What’s at Stake: Dignity, Affordability, Democracy
Basic human dignity
Dignity requires more than subsistence; it requires agency—the ability to refuse bad deals, plan a future, care for family, and participate as an equal citizen. When livelihoods hinge on opaque algorithms or on-demand piecework, dignity erodes.Ability to afford goods and services
If automation lowers average costs but concentrates income, affordability becomes a math problem without a solution: cheap things, empty wallets. The economy can produce abundance while households live scarcity.Civic health
Work has been a social glue—where people meet, collaborate, and build solidarity. Precarity fragments this glue; subscription life channels everything through a private gatekeeper. When fewer people feel economically secure, democratic attention migrates from long-term public goods to short-term survival.
Let’s lock arms and fight for dignity together.
VIII. A Humane Transition: Design, Not Drift
Nothing about the next economy is predetermined. We can hard-code human dignity into its architecture.
1) Make income less hostage to a job.
Universal basic services (healthcare, childcare, transit, broadband) cut the cash you need to live.
Earnings insurance and portable benefits follow the person across gigs and employers.
Pilot dividends from data and AI productivity—shared returns funded by a small levy on large-scale AI deployments and cloud rents.
2) Give workers power where they stand.
Sectoral bargaining and wage boards set floors in industries where firm-level organizing is hard.
Co-determination and employee ownership put worker voice in governance and share the upside of automation.
Enforce algorithmic transparency: explainable scheduling, pay calculation, and performance decisions; independent audits for bias and wage theft.
3) Tax where the surplus lives.
Modernize excess-profits and monopoly taxes; align global minimums to stop profit shifting.
Treat buybacks and mega-distributions as signals to share gains with workers and the public that enabled them.
4) Restore real ownership for consumers.
Enact right-to-repair and interoperability mandates; treat DRM abuses as unfair trade practices.
Require offline functionality or escrowed keys for essential goods; if a service is discontinued, users get tools to unlock and migrate.
5) Aim automation at complementing people, not replacing them.
Tie public procurement and tax credits to human-complementary adoption—AI that augments care workers, teachers, technicians—paired with paid upskilling.
Fund apprenticeships and technical high schools that treat modern craft—robot tech, HVAC, precision machining, elder care—as high-status careers.
6) Measure what matters.
Supplement GDP with national dashboards for median income growth, household cost burdens, time sovereignty (predictable schedules), and repairability—because what we measure, we manage.
What happened to no one is above the law?
IX. The Choice in Front of Us
We have traveled from lords and masters to contracts and code. Feudalism denied mobility; slavery denied humanity; the platform age risks denying agency—the practical freedom to make plans and hold power to account. Automation and AI can either free us from drudgery or free capital from paying for labor. Subscriptions can either smooth access or sentence families to perpetual rent.
History’s lesson is not that progress is inevitable. It’s that progress is designed—through rules that balance innovation with equity, and through institutions that insist prosperity be shared. The future of work should not be a museum of old coercions dressed in new interfaces. It can be a commons of capability, where technology lifts human dignity rather than pricing it.
We still get to choose.
Capitalism has run its course. Like slavery before that, and feudalism before that.